Description

If upgrading from a version before 3.2 and you have used your own bookmarks then you must move the folder from your theme folder to wp-content – see the FAQ for more details

Social Bookmarks is an easy but powerful way to implement social bookmarking on your WordPress blog. The plugin will display a row of social bookmarking icons wherever you add its code – for an individual post and page or in a sidebar. They are split between bookmarking services and tools (e.g. printing, converting to PDF, etc).

Key features include…

Links to over 270 social bookmarking networks – more than any other plugin!

Many non-English bookmarking sites are included – particularly Russian, Chinese and Japanese

No administration screens and no translation therefore required

Displays links to useful tools as well as social services

Style and alternative image options allow for various animation effects

Output can be cached to minimize impact to your website

Icons provided for all bookmarking services, but you can specify your own

There are 5 parameters in total that can be specified, but all are optional.

The first parameter can contain a number of options, all of which are separated by an ampersand. These options are as follows…

default= : This should be on, off or basic and defines which social bookmarks should display by default. on means all should display, off means none should be displayed and basic shows a basic few. Not specifying this sub-parameter will cause the basic set to be displayed.

iconfolder= : If not specified, a default set of 16×16 pixel icons will be used. If, however, you’d like to use your own icons then you will need to add a sub-folder in wp-content and then use this parameter to specify the sub-folders name. In the above example, I am specifying a sub-folder named 24x24. Icons should all have a .PNG extension and the file names must match the bookmarking service name, as specified below. Bookmarking services are shown first and tools afterwards.

priority= : Allows you to specify whether a bookmark link should be via AddThis (1), Shareaholic (2) or AddtoAny (3) (if a link via more than one is available). This is defined by providing a series of numbers representing the order of the services. So, a priority of 231 would be Shareaholic first, followed by AddToAny and then AddThis. The default priority is 123.

nofollow= : By default, REL=NOFOLLOW will be added to all links. However, if this is specified as NO then this will be deactivated.

target= : Allows you to specify a TARGET. By default this is not used.

separator= : If you wish to display a separator image between the bookmark and icon lists then you must specify separator=Yes. An image named separator.png will then be displayed. If using your own folder for images then this image will be required as well.

id= : If using the animation option (see the later section) then a unique ID must be specified for each set of social bookmarks on the screen. If there is only one set of bookmarks per post and page, then the best option is to pass the post ID via get_the_ID(). By default, no ID is specified so animation is turned off.

cache= : This indicates how long, in hours, to cache the output. If nothing is specified, 24 hours is assumed. To switch off caching set this to false.

There are also options for EACH of the social bookmarking services allowing you to specify whether they should be turned on or off. So, for example, to turn Digg off, you would specify digg=off.

So, as a further example, if you ONLY wanted the Delicious and Digg bookmarks to appear, it would be best to specify the default as off and then turn Delicious and Digg on individually, like so…

<?php echo social_bookmarks( 'default=off&delicious=on&digg=on' ); ?>

The full list of social bookmark services are listed separately. However, the basic set of services are as follows…

The second parameter is a style definition which applies to the bookmark icons. This should, where possible, not be used in preference to using CSS definitions. Instead each element generated has a class of ssb so that it can be defined via your own stylesheet. The separator class is ssb_sep.

The third parameter is the URL that you wish the social sites to bookmark. If left blank (and this is probably the default for most people) it will use the URL of the current post or page.

The fourth parameter is where you can specify a shortened URL to bookmark (if you have one available). To maintain backward compatibility with previous version of this plugin, the URL must begin with “http” to be accepted. At the moment Twitter, Identica and Blip will be passed shortened URLs. If you think any other services should be included, please [ask in the forum](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/simple-social-bookmarks “Forum”). If no short URL is specified then the post/page short link will be used – if this is not available then a short URL will not be used. Alternatively, set the short URL to No to prevent a short URL from being used at all.

Finally, the fifth parameter is an optional title – if this is not specified the title of the current page or post is used.

Using the shortcode

If you wish to add social bookmarks directly into a post or page you can use the shortcode [bookmarks]. All the same parameters as the PHP function are available and are named url, shorturl, style, options and title.

Obviously, you will need to modify the parameters that are passed to the Social Bookmarks plugin, to make it appropriate for yourself. In the above example you may notice that I’m using an alternative set of icons with a small padded space between them.

Animation

A basic animation option is available and is switched on by providing a unique ID parameter (see earlier details).

Once specified, hovering over a bookmark option will switch it from the standard icon to another with _hov on the end.

For instance, hovering over twitter.png will switch the image to twitter_hov.png. When you move away, it will return to the original image. This extra image will need to exist in the same folder as the first.

However, although basic, it can be used for all sorts of effects, such as black & white icons becoming colored when hovered over or icons that expand in size.

Here is an example where I’m switching on the animation option by specifying a unique ID…

Animation can also be performed by modifying the stylesheet. The following example will cause the images to move up by 5 pixels whenever they are hovered over, in a similar way to the SexyBookmarks or Simple Social plugins.

Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress administration.

Voila! It’s ready to go.

I’m upgrading from a version prior to 3.2. What do I need to do?

If you don’t use your own bookmark icons, nothing. Otherwise, the default folder location has changed – this is so that upgrading a theme doesn’t cause them to go missing. Simply move your icon folder to your installations wp-content folder for it to continue to work.

The Social Bookmarking site is not appearing

If you’ve not specified default=on then new sites will not appear – you will need to specifically switch it on.

The icons provided with the plugin are the standard icons for each of the sites (usually the site’s favicon). There are many good, free collections available. However, none have the full set that this plugin uses, which is why I use this generic group.

None-the-less, most people will probably only want to display a few, popular, sites and therefore various icon collections will be ideal.

I keep a huge database of over 500 bookmarking services. However, I only use those that appear to be the most popular, based on Google search results. If you think I have missed one of great importance, please request it on the forum and plead your case!

Contributors & Developers

“Social Bookmarks” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

1.6

Enhancement: Added Yahoo! Bookmarks, Yahoo! Buzz and Google Buzz to the list of providers. By default these will be turned off (including using the default=on option) so as to not to suddenly appear on existing installs

1.5

Enhancement: Use different encoding for email links

Enhancement: Added Technorati to the list of providers. By default this will be turned off (including using the default=on option) so as to not to suddenly appear on existing installs.

1.4

Maintenance: Removed caching, as this is now handled by Simple URL Shortener. Please ensure you update to the latest version of this plugin to ensure that caching continues to work – once you know it does, the cache folder for this plugin can be removed

Maintenance: Tidied code and updated shared functions

Enhancement: Added additional parameter – cache=

1.3

Enhancement: Updated default icons to a set kindly provided by komodomedia.com (With the exception of the AddToAny and Ping.FM icons)

Enhancement: Added AddToAny, Ping.fm, Google Bookmarks, Google Reader and email to the list of providers. By default these will be turned off so as to not to suddenly appear on existing installs and cause problems!

Enhancement: Further improvement to blog title issues

Enhancement: Removed URL shortening on all services with the exception of Twitter, as it was not required and may have even have caused some issues (such as some services not being able to get hold of thumbnails and general page content).